Confessions is an audio-visual project by Teitur, composer Nico Muhly and the dutch ensemble Holland Baroque Society. About a year ago, these young and talented artists started a challenging project: composing music for YouTube clips. Even the comments were used as an inspiration for the lyrics and in a short time four wonderful songs were created, all matching the video's in a surprisingly brilliant way.

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How To Make a Sandwich on the Island:

Jack
1. Gather ingredients
2. Point gun at ingredients and shout “HOW DO I MAKE A SANDWICH OUT OF YOU?!?!?”
3. Breathe heavily through your nose as though you were about to hit ingredients
4. Give up and make the sandwich yourself, and eat it bitterly

Kate
1. Make separate sandwiches, one with peanut butter and one with jelly
2. Take a bite of the peanut butter sandwich, declaring it the best
3. Take a bite of the jelly sandwich, declaring it the best
4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 ad infinitum
5. Follow peanut butter or jelly sandwich into grave danger

Sawyer
1. Throw the jar of jelly at wall, sneering “I don’t need no sandwich”
2. Call the mascot on the jar of peanut butter lots of clever nicknames
3. Huff and puff and stomp around and grumble a lot
4. When no one’s looking, make perfect, even, symmetrical peanut butter and jelly sandwich and sit in a corner, enjoying every bite

Locke
1. Sit idly by, believing that the ingredients will find a way to make a sandwich out of themselves
2. Lose faith and make the sandwich anyway
3. Realize that you were the instrument by which the ingredients chose to make a sandwich after all
4. Run around the room and grab everyone’s knives, insisting that their sandwiches will do the same in time

Hurley
1. Make sandwich
2. Eat sandwich
3. Repeat steps 1 and 2 ad infinitum

Sayid
1. Procure 23 milligrams of uranium-20
2. Set hadron supercollider to eight megajoules
3. Program a sandwich-making macro using Cobol or Visual Basic
4. Act all tough-like

Desmond
1. Eat sandwich
2. Call the sandwich “brother”
3. Place peanut butter slice over jelly slice
4. Spread jelly on the other slice
5. Spread peanut butter on one slice
6. Take two slices of bread, a jar of peanut butter and a jar of jelly

Ben
1. Steal someone else’s sandwich
2. Claim you coerced them into making the sandwich for you all along
3. Say you’ll tell them everything if they make you another sandwich
4. Stare at them all creepy-like

Libby
1. Lay out plans for one of the most intricate, fascinating, and delicious sandwiches of all time
2. Just as you start making it, get shot

Danielle
1. Apply peanut butter
2. Disappear for eight months
3. Apply jelly
4. Disappear for eight months
5. Eat sandwich

Claire
1. Mmmmmmm, peanut butter

Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse
1. Make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich
2. Have someone take a bite, then tell them it’s a baloney sandwich
3. Make up a whole bunch of other shit, then say you had planned it all along
4. Buy a few yachts

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http://www.npr.org/templates/music/

Or check out "Music Interludes View":

Sure, it's not the most exciting music known to man (or even known to NPR), but the fact that the site includes several ways of finding the music is great.  I still struggle with WXPN's online playlists, especially since they exclude anything heard on World Cafe Live.

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There are more than a few days a week where I think the coolest job in the world might be writing copy for the products on Woot.com.  Today is one of those days.

http://sellout.woot.com/Default.aspx?WootSaleId=11617&ts=1264027529&sig=951b98906d0f3643

Seriously, does anyone know where I can sign up for this gig?

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Light brown bearded blue striped beanie for youth

Fetch me a child's head on which to put this!  Or shrink my head on which to put this!

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Alright, so maybe the sloth isn't part of the Chinese zodiac, but Paste magazine's list of Etsy's Very Best Sloth Stuff will certainly have you thinking about nature's slowest multi-clawed creatures for a few minutes.

I especially enjoy Papervictory's Etsy shop above - who knew so many animals had so many things to say?

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There's a long-running legend in my college town of Fredonia, NY that the Marx Brothers - while performing at the historic 1891 Opera House, then part of the vaudeville circuit - were kicked out of town for bringing hookers back to their room.  In response, the dysfunctional nation led by Groucho's Rufus T. Firefly was named "Freedonia" in their next film, Duck Soup:

Despite having alma matered, matriculated and / or otherwise grad-ee-ated from that fine institution, I never did find out what the real story was (if there was one at all) until now.  The story I've always heard is completely fabricated, but there was something akin to a fiasco when the film was released.  According to this 1933 TIME magazine movie review, the mayor of Fredonia took issue with the unflattering use of the village name:

"*Mayor Harry B. Hickey of Fredonia, N. Y. protested to the Marxes: "The name of Fredonia has been without a blot since 1817. I feel it is my duty as Mayor to question your intentions in using the name of our city in your picture."

Back cracked the Marxes: "Your excellency: Our advice is that you change the name of your town. It is hurting our picture. Anyhow, what makes you think you are Mayor of Fredonia? Do you wear a black moustache, play the harp, speak with an Italian accent or chase girls like Harpo? We are certain you do not. Therefore we must be Mayor of Fredonia, not you. The old gray Mayor ain't what he used to be."

No hookers, but I do enjoy the Marx Brothers response, which boils down to an advertisement for the film and family brand.  It would also appear that Mayor Harry B. Hickey never saw any of their films, as I'm almost positive that those very same words were uttered by every Marx Brothers' "villain" - it's like he was just asking to be slandered.

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or, "things that scared me as a kid, part 1."

My parents were big fans of the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes when I was a kid, and every Sunday night (at least I remember it being on Sundays) they'd turn on Mystery! and scare me half to death with the Edward Gorey-animated introduction:

There's an alternate version as well - equally terrifying, mostly do to the wailing woman and score by Normand Roger:

Granted, I absolutely love watching this today.  The murder-in-high-Victorian-society imagery and stately-but-macabre score is great, as is the narration - how does someone fill the phrase "a grant from the Mobil corporation" with so much dread?

Was anyone else as traumatized by this as I was?  And why didn't Holmes ever solve any of the cases that occurred immediately before he appeared on screen?

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Why yes, Carly, this is exactly my kind of thing - a fully-functional harmonica-cum-flash drive.

I'd say more, but the video below says it all.  If only it could record what's played on it, and if only my hopes and dreams hadn't been thwarted time after time by my utter lack of harmonic skills:

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I have a mild obsession with rhetorical structure, linguistics and flowcharts (if they're funny - I'm not one of those weird regular flowchart people).

Love All This' Hey Jude Flowchart is pretty great, and the fact that it's categorized under "Nerd" blows the lid off of my own categorization system.

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